Fact of the day

Information is the most powerful weapon.

Monday

Fact N°
1692

El Paso, Texas, was the first U.S. city to pass laws making marijuana illegal.

According to a story by William Martin in Texas Monthly, marijuana first came under the scrutiny of El Paso civic leaders in 1914, having chiefly arrived in Texas by way of Mexican immigrants settling in the state. That year, El Paso passed the first known law banning the drug in the United States, a drug that until that time had been "legally and widely used for at least 5,000 years."

Tuesday

Fact N°
1693

In the average oil field, only one-third of the oil is recovered.

That's generally about how much oil in a typical field is relatively easy to recover. The other two-thirds of the oil might, for example, be locked into rock and very, very difficult to recover. Oil fields almost always produce substantially more oil than is initially predicted, because those predictions are based on the current drilling and recovering technology. As technology advances over many years, the predictions about oil yield tend to skyrocket.

Wednesday

Fact N°
1694

Contrary to popular opinion, Spike Jonze is not heir to a German catalog fortune.

Video and film director Spike Jonze was born Adam Spiegel, and many -- including New York Magazine and The New York Times -- have made the mistake of believing he is heir to the $3 billion Spiegel catalog fortune. Although his family does have some distant relation with the original Spiegel family, neither Jonze himself nor anyone in his family is an heir to the catalog fortune.

Thursday

Fact N°
1696

It's legal to make and sell copies of CDs or DVDs thanks to the First-Sale Doctrine.

Acknowledged by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1908 and expanded by the Copyright Act of 1976, this aspect of U.S. copyright law is a reason why a company like Netflix has been able to do so well, since all they really did was buy DVDs of movies, like anyone else, then they made an extraordinary number of copies of them. The studios were helpless to stop them.

Friday

Fact N°
1697

The human brain runs on just 20 watts of power.

The brain has as many as 100 billion neurons (nerve cells), and they -- along with their thousands of connections to other neurons -- are very good at generating electrical impulses, and it doesn't much matter what time of day it is or what the person is doing, this electrical activity -- powered by food, mostly sugar -- in the blood, amounts to about 20 watts of power, or about the equivalent of the little light bulb in one's refrigerator.

Saturday

Fact N°
1698

Plants pollinated by insects account for a third of the total human diet.

While a number of insects contribute to the pollination, most of the work is done by honeybees. In fact, in North America alone, honeybees are responsible for pollinating as many as 90 different crops, the yearly value of which is believed to be around $15 billion, according to a story in Discover Magazine.

Sunday

Fact N°
1699

The sweetest substance known to science is 220,000 times sweeter than sugar.

Only developed in 1996 at the University of Lyon in France, lugduname's potency as a sweetening agent is estimated to be at least 220,000 times sweeter than sucrose, possibly 300,000 times sweeter. It is considered a sweetener of guanidine -- a crystalline compound that is found in plastic products and explosives. It is not approved for use in foods.